


every day you gave it

by sunsmasher



Series: Thirty Years and Change (the olympics verse) [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: And the Consequences Thereof, Background Relationships, Blood, Body Horror, Dirty Talk, Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M, Major Character Injury, Riding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 04:00:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9217925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: Oikawa's knee isn't getting better. He's getting worse.Tooru had wanted Iwaizumi's fussing, at the start. He’d enjoyed it. A lifetime of agonizingly platonic friendship, two years of absence, and suddenly here was Iwaizumi Hajime, caring for Tooru, living with him, being in love with him, even sucking his dick if Tooru laid an elegant wrist to his forehead and whined in the right tone. All that attention, all for him.Now, his knee throbs. He thinks sometimes about wrapping a tourniquet around his thigh, stopping the blood from flowing into his knee and carrying the pain out of it. Watching the flesh go white and numb.“Hey,” Iwaizumi says.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Blood/body horror warning for the first dream sequence, emetophobia warning for the second. General sadness warning for most of it.
> 
> This is a direct sequel to the previous fic in the series, Thirty Years and Change, and might be hard to understand without having read that first. If you'd like to try tho, basically Iwaizumi and Oikawa are around about 28, Iwaizumi's a firefighter, and Oikawa was the captain and setter for the Japanese National Team before he destroyed his knee right in the second-to-last match of the games. It wasn't great, but Iwaizumi did confess his big romanza feelings shortly after, so, silver linings. This fic takes place about three months later.

“People are going to love you the rest of your life,” Iwaizumi is saying to Tooru. He’s hard to hear over the jungle frenzy of the gold medal match, but he’s leaning one shoulder towards Tooru, probably unconsciously, face intent and openly needing and staring everywhere but at Tooru, who’s staring at him.

“They’re going to love you,” Iwaizumi says, “and they’re going to fear you,” he laughs, “and just like Kageyama and fucking half the rest of the pro players in the world, they’re going to try their hardest to be you—” This is the part where Tooru had finally understood what was happening, what Iwaizumi was really, finally saying to him. “Whatever the fuck it is you’re doing. Whoever you decide to be. Athlete, astronaut, prime minister, whatever. There’s just— there’s more to you than volleyball, man.”

Tooru remembers the sheer inability that had overtaken him, the first time they did this. To think, to speak, to hear anything beyond his own thundering heart, see the world beyond that little half-smile growing in the corner of Iwaizumi’s mouth. He’d seemed to slip out of groove for a moment, as if nothing had ever happened to him, would happen to him, except for Iwaizumi’s smile, and his knotted hands, and the way his voice had hitched, just for a second, when he’d said: “There always has been.”

But no, that’s not right.

“Well, what else is there?” Tooru says.

Iwaizumi looks up.

“Excuse me?”

The dream starts to break down at this point. Tooru’s been running off well-loved, much-reviewed memory until now, and most of that carries over, in the boom of the crowd and how the light off someone’s phone or watch or something keeps dancing over Iwaizumi’s neck. The Japanese bench has been replaced by Neko Atsume cats, however. And Iwaizumi’s wearing his high school uniform now, rakishly unbuttoned, which Tooru would really prefer not indicate a fetish of any kind.

“I mean, it’s all very nice,” Tooru says. “And you’re very nice to say it, don’t get me wrong!” He lays a consoling hand on Iwaizumi’s thigh, and even keeps his fingers because Tooru is master of his own subconscious and all iterations of Iwaizumi living therein. “I just think you’re wrong.”

Dream-Iwaizumi frowns sternly. “You think I’m wrong about being in love with you?”

“Oh, whoa, Iwa-chan, we haven’t even gotten to that part of the conversation yet!” says Tooru laughs, throwing his hands back. “No, you’re definitely in love with me, but you’re wrong about there being more to me than volleyball. It was a nice sentiment, but, you know, having had a couple months to reflect on it I think you are incredibly incorrect.”

Dream-Iwaizumi doesn’t look happy with this idea. A large cartoon cat with Kageyama’s haircut is subbed in from the Japanese bench. The other cartoons screech excitedly.

“I wasn’t lying to you,” Iwaizumi says. His voice is quiet and stony, like when he means something truly.

“I know you weren’t,” says Tooru, smiling slowly. He taps two fingers against his kneecap in an uneven beat. “You really think there’s something I can do in the world that isn’t hitting a ball over a net. You think it so hard, you even manage to convince me, sometimes. That doesn’t make it true, though.”

There’s a stuttering rhythm to the fans’ cheers, with a shrill reverb that’s starting to put the volleyball cats on edge. Tooru’s fingers jump to its time, striking harder against skin and bone.

“It’s hard to argue with you when I’m just part of your subconscious,” Iwaizumi says, sounding frustrated. He’s tugging at the cuffs of his uniform jacket in a gesture Tooru hasn’t seen in many, many years.

“Yes, this is working out pretty well for me,” Tooru says, over Iwaizumi’s scoff. There’s a weird air in the stadium now, heavy and green-tinted.

“Devaluing yourself?”

“Being truthful about myself.” He speaks it clearly. His fingers go tap-tap-tap. “What else have I ever done? I mean, if I can’t do this, then what’s the point? I’m too old to learn anything else. I’ve given all the best parts of myself to volleyball. There’s nothing left over.”

“Oikawa—”

Tap-tap-tap. Screeching fans, the air too dark.

“The fans know it. The world knows it. My parents, the doctors, the team. You, if you’d ever let yourself—”

_“Oikawa!”_

Iwaizumi grabs his wrist. The too-high echoes crest. Tooru’s fingers are red and dripping.

He looks down. Two holes in his knee the shape of his fingers, blood covering his shin like he’d swum in it, creamy white bone peeking through the flesh.

“But it didn’t even hurt…” he says.

Iwaizumi is shouting.

“It didn’t even—"

 

* * *

 

“If your knee’s hurting,” Iwaizumi grumbles, voice hitching as he rolls his hips down on Tooru’s cock, “and you’re not telling me,” another gasp, his eyes screwed shut as if he were listening hard for a sound just out of hearing, “—no sex for a month.”

There’s a world in which, upon hearing this, Tooru would have grabbed Iwaizumi, got him under him, pressed him down on his stomach with a hand at the back of his head and fucked him absolutely senseless. It’s not this world.

Three weeks post-surgery for a torn ACL and tattered meniscus, Tooru still can’t put weight on his right leg. He can barely bend it. Pissing standing up was an achievement. And as much as he fantasizes, as much as he’s been fantasizing for years and years and years about bending Iwaizumi over the nearest flat surface and driving his cock into him until the only words his boyfriend had left were “Tooru” and “please,” he can’t. He wouldn’t be upright long enough to get his dick out.

Tooru thrusts up into Iwaizumi, hard. Like he can somehow be satisfied with this one single position they’ve found that doesn’t leave Tooru scrambling for the painkillers afterwards. As if his knee doesn’t still ache, dully and sharply, in its own spiteful rhythm.

“Okay,” Iwaizumi says, still making those low, breathy noises that Tooru finds so richly satisfying as he drives up into him again and again, “Okay, I’m gonna be late for work. Let’s wrap this up.”

He reaches a hand for his cock and Tooru, frustrated and three weeks in pain and desperately trying to forget dreams of his bone and blood pouring between his too-green fingers, swats it away.

“You’ll come when I say you come, Iwa-chan,” Tooru snaps, and Iwaizumi gets this look on his face like he’s got another goddamn idea.

A hand closes hard around Tooru’s throat.

Iwaizumi is over him, on him, hissing in his ear, “And what makes you think _you’ve_ earned the right to come, you dirty little slut?”

It’s not even fair _._

Tooru comes so hard his back bows, like a beam under strain, and moans without hope of dignity. Iwaizumi’s hips shift under his bruising grip, Iwaizumi rising onto his knees as Tooru spends himself, shuddering and gasping, inside of him. Immediately there’s a rough hand on his chin, pulling Tooru’s face from where he’s pressed it hard into the pillows. He opens bleary eyes just in time to catch a healthy splattering of jizz across the face.

“Don’t fucking call me Iwa-chan in bed,” Iwaizumi growls and lets Tooru thump back against the sheets.

“Fuck,” Tooru wheezes, rubbing at his throat. Iwaizumi looks smug.

“So that was pretty hot,” Tooru says when he’s gotten the rest of his breath back, wiping the come from his face as Iwaizumi makes grumbling noises in the bathroom about remembering a condom next time, “but maybe a little bit overkill? Have we considered that?”

“You had it coming,” Iwaizumi calls back. There’s the noise of the shower starting.

Tooru considers making an excellent and sure-to-be-enjoyed jizz joke, but tosses his nasty tissues at the waste bin instead. They go wide.

The pain’s back. It was hiding for a bit during the orgasm, kindly ceding that half a minute of sensation, but it’s back now. Iwaizumi’s still showering so Tooru can let himself feel it, hiss and clench his jaw and use two careful hands to steady his braced-up knee as he sits up against the headboard. Iwaizumi would fuss if he saw. He’d ask if Tooru had done all his PT right, or if he’d forgotten his pills, or if he needed Iwaizumi to throw another ice pack in the freezer, and Tooru doesn’t want that.

He had wanted it, at the start. He’d enjoyed it. A lifetime of agonizingly platonic friendship, two years of absence, and suddenly here was Iwaizumi Hajime, caring for Tooru, living with him, being in love with him, even sucking his dick if Tooru laid an elegant wrist to his forehead and whined in the right tone. All that attention, all for him.

Now, his knee throbs. He thinks sometimes about wrapping a tourniquet around his thigh, stopping the blood from flowing into his knee and carrying the pain out of it. Watching the flesh go white and numb.

“Hey,” Iwaizumi says.

He’s standing next to the bed, dripping steadily, a towel held around his hips with one hand. Tooru can see the bruises his fingers left peeking over the fabric. Iwaizumi is gazing at him.

“No sex for a month?” he says. His voice is soft, like Tooru could almost pretend he didn’t hear it over the first noises of morning rush hour seeping through their window. Iwaizumi’s looking steadily at Tooru, though, like he cares.

“No sex for a month,” Tooru replies, hearing his own dull tone, watching his fingers dig into the fabric of the brace.

There’s a hand on his chin again. Tooru’s head is gently turned. Iwaizumi’s lips meet his with a tenderness that shocks Tooru, like bad wiring in his gut, every single time.

“It’s okay,” Iwaizumi says against his mouth. “It’s okay, babe.”

 _But how do you know?_ Tooru wants to shriek, but he kisses back instead, letting Iwaizumi’s lips move softly over his, without hurry. He tries to deepen it and Iwaizumi only puts his hands to Tooru’s jaw and holds him steady.

“Only a twenty-four hour shift this time,” Iwaizumi says at some point, still holding Tooru’s head in his hands. The towel landed somewhere unimportant on the carpet. “So I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Your mom will be here in an hour to take you to the doctor’s. And Bokuto and Kuroo are coming over at six, don’t forget.”

“Mmmph,” Tooru says, still sneaking kisses, “Yes, knew all that, thank you.”

“Fucker,” Iwaizumi grins. “Don’t forget your PT and your pills. I’ll put another ice pack in the freezer on my way out.”

Tooru rolls his eyes. Iwaizumi bats him upside the head. Tooru howls. Iwaizumi pulls on his uniform with stunning indifference.

Tooru’s scrolling through Kageyama’s instagram and liking all the photos with Hinata Shoyo’s forehead (and only his forehead) in them when Iwaizumi finally makes it to the door.

“Text me after you see the doctor!” he shouts as Tooru leaves a few strategic winking emoji’s on a blurry shot of Hinata’s pink ear. “And take a shower, you smell like depression!”

“Love your sensitivity, darling!” Tooru shouts back, and Iwaizumi’s laugh carries him out the door.

Tooru spends another few minutes benevolently harassing Kageyama before a text notification consisting only of a shower emoji and a sparkly pink heart drops down his screen, and then he has to dedicate a few seconds to burying his red face in the bedspread before he can lever himself up and start hobbling for the bathroom.

 

* * *

 

He’s in the doctor’s office. It’s real, not a dream.

“—sutured areas failing to heal,” the doctor is saying, pointing at something on the paper Tooru’s holding.

“—were unable to get a clear picture around the scar tissues until now, unfortunately, but—”

Tooru’s having trouble paying attention. The words keep sliding out his skull without ever leaving a hint of meaning, like too-courteous guests cleaning house before they go.

“—go back in to trim the meniscus down, which will at least—”

“Wait,” Tooru says, looking up, “Wait. I need more surgery?”

The doctor, an older woman with thick grey hair like Tooru’s mother, pauses. She looks at Tooru with so much sympathy it makes him want to spit.

“Your meniscus,” she says, explains, “the shock-absorbing cartilage between your femur and shin,” as if Tooru doesn’t know what’s broken in his own body, as if he hasn’t spent sleepless nights absorbing all the medical horror stories Iwaizumi warned him off of, “isn’t healing like I’d hoped.”

She taps at her own clipboard. “The tears were just too close to zones of low blood flow. We’re going to have to go back in and trim the edges of the tears, removing the damaged tissue, if you want to walk without pain again.”

Walking without pain seems so frankly unreal that Tooru discards the idea immediately. Impossible, unimportant.

“But my ACL is healing, right?” he says. The paper, whatever it is, he never read it, is mashing in his grip. There’s some kindly line between the doctor’s eyes that’s making his pulse spike. “I’ll be able to play again.”

The doctor purses her lips.

Tooru wants to run suddenly. To not be here, to not hear what this old woman with her sagging cheeks and thin slash of a mouth is about to say to him.

He doesn’t want—

“No,” she says. “I can’t recommend you return to professional play.”

Tooru blinks, once, rapidly, a stutter of darkness.

She says: “After the procedure you’ll have too little meniscus left to protect the joint.”

She says: “With physical therapy you’ll be able to resume daily life without pain, but high-impact sports will cause you significant permanent damage.”

She says: “You’d be arthritic before you turned forty.”

Tooru hears all of it, computes all of it, and wishes so suddenly and desperately that he hadn’t. Twenty seconds ago, when he didn’t know this, when he couldn’t understand what the doctor was saying to him, that was the sweet spot. That was a life worth living.

“I’m truly sorry, Oikawa-san,” she tells him, and Tooru wonders distantly if she’s going to touch his arm, and if he’d just savage her for it like a beaten dog, “I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear.”

It isn’t.

And that’s that.

The doctor gives him a refill for his prescriptions and offers him his crutches and advises him to set a date for the procedure with her assistant. Tooru takes the refill and his crutches and nods when he’s supposed to. He leaves the office. He takes the elevator down to the street.

It’s November in Sendai. It’s cold. Tooru thinks he might be shivering.

He’d never thought seriously about retiring, honestly. He knew he’d have to someday. People got old, they died, they retired. The order varied, maybe, but they all happened.

It’s just— it wasn’t supposed to be his last game. Against the Greek men’s team. You were supposed to _know_ when you were playing your last game, so you could savor it. So you could wow them all one last time. So you could look each of your teammates in the eye, and spread your arms wide to the fans, and say _you were good,_ and _I was good,_ and _god, this was worth every day I gave it._

In the last game of Tooru’s life, he’d looked up into the stands only twice. The first time, Iwaizumi hadn’t been there and it had felt like maybe that was how it was supposed to be. It was like he’d always known the rest of his life would disappoint him, but he had the game and he had his triumph, and he could be content with that. He could be _happy_ with that.

The second time, Iwaizumi had been in the stands. And he’d been looking at Tooru. And the sudden, helpless joy in that had been sickening.

And then he’d destroyed his knee. And then he’d played his last game.

Tooru’s thoughts don’t get any further than that. They circle the moment of impact, the _snk_ and _pop_ of his knee collapsing under his weight, like finches around a turbine. He grips the crossbars of his crutches until he can feel the lines of the metal press into his flesh.

“Hey! Tooru!” shouts a voice, and before he can look up, hardly even a conscious act, Tooru’s smile has fitted into place like it slid in on grooves.

His sister waves again, sticking one hand out the window of her little Suzuki, and reaches to pop open the passenger door when Tooru hobbles over.

“How’d it go?” she asks as Tooru folds himself into the seat. It’d been hard enough when his height was the only problem, never mind the knee. “Healing up alright?”

“Yup, quicker than ever,” Tooru says, lying easily and not wondering why as he fiddles with the seat position. He finds the bar under the cushion, slides the seat back until it can’t go any farther. He looks up at his sister.

She’s wearing a jersey for Takeru’s baseball team and looking at him curiously, but when he smiles again, a practiced motion, she smiles back.

“Good!” she says, putting the car into gear. “Can’t wait to have you back on the court and out of my hair again. And I’m sure Iwaizumi feels the same, poor man.”

Tooru doesn’t say anything. His sister keeps talking.

“Can’t understand why he let you move in. I mean I know he’s in love with you, which, gross, but we have to draw a line somewhere, don’t we? Does he have no standards?”

Tooru pulls out his phone, thumbs open the home screen. He’s supposed to text Iwaizumi. Iwaizumi will be waiting for him to text.

“You better be giving him such head, little brother,” his sister is saying. Her hair’s falling away from its ponytail, too short in the back to keep the shape. “I think he’s rearranged his entire life to make you happy.”

Tooru waits, then slips his phone back into his pocket as his sister goes on. He leans back in his seat and he watches the houses flash by.

 

* * *

 

It’s like a yawning pit, like a death in the family, and Tooru sits with his head between his knees, one bent, one braced, until it’s 6:05 PM and there’s a knock at the door.

Then Tooru grabs a crutch, stands, and shoves it down until he can’t feel it anymore.

“Captain!” Bokuto says, shouts really, when Tooru opens the door. “You’re looking good!”

“Of course I am,” Tooru purrs, and then pauses. “Wait, really? I haven’t washed my hair in three days”

“You’re not in a hospital bed, dude!” Bokuto laughs as him and Kuroo and the ever-delightful Baby Natsumi, strapped to Bokuto’s chest and giggling heartily, stream into the apartment.

“It’s a killer look,” Kuroo adds, clapping Tooru on the shoulder. “How you been, man?”

“Iwaizumi goes and brings home the bacon while I spend all day watching Terrace House and sometimes stretch,” Tooru says with an easy grin. Is it still a lie if all the component parts are technically true? “Couldn’t be better.”

“Excellent,” Kuroo smiles. It’s a smile with a lot of teeth, but not in a threatening way. Kuroo’s just a man with a wealth of teeth, and, seemingly, the exact same bedhead he rocked at every highschool game they ever played. It’s an odd brand, but Tooru can at least respect the dedication.

Bokuto and Kuroo brought dinner, despite Tooru’s protests and at, Tooru is sure, Iwaizumi’s request, so there’s a great deal of unpacking and reheating and arguing about how to use Iwaizumi’s old hand-crank can opener (Bokuto wins) before food happens. Tooru is parked firmly at the apartment’s single square table, which will just fit the three of them, and given Natusmi. This is amenable to Tooru. Natsumi cackles and makes a good show of eating Tooru’s shirt collar.

“The best baby in the world!” Tooru coos as rice and curry and cutlery begin to land on the table. “The best baby in the whole entire world!” Natsumi screeches happily and claps her fat little hands together, staring at Tooru in pure fascination.

“Man, she sure does love you, Captain,” Bokuto says as he thumps down in the chair across from Tooru, Kuroo taking the seat by the windows.

“She knows real character when she sees it,” Tooru replies, bouncing Natsumi on his good knee, and Kuroo laughs. “And you know you don’t have to call me Captain anymore. The national team won’t even exist again for another three years.”

“Eh, just a precaution,” Bokuto says with a shrug. “You’ll be captain again soon enough.”

It’s the careless certainty with which he says it, the confidence Tooru can recognize from his own tones, that makes him inhale. Natsumi has her hands wrapped around his fingers, squawling contentedly as she tries to fit them into her mouth, and Tooru watches her do it at a certain remove.

He broke that pinky on a block once, he thinks, and says, “Your confidence in me is both appreciated and richly-deserved, Bo-chan, thank you.”

It’s a hair off the right timing, he waited too long watching his old breaks and bruises disappear under Natsumi’s grabbing hands, but Bokuto and Kuroo laugh and dig at him, and that means he’s saved it. The fiction continues. Good work, Tooru.

They talk, about Akaashi’s office politics and the 48-hour shifts Iwaizumi has to take every few weeks, and about sports and the weather and the news.

“And he was running guns for Philippine jungle extremists the entire time!” Kuroo laughs, slamming his palm to the table. “Buzzfeed exposed the entire thing! It’s too fucking wild!”

Tooru can almost feel human doing this, watching Bokuto gasp and Natsumi mimic her father and Kuroo lean forward, invested in his retelling. He can almost forget the feeling he’s been avoiding, like being untethered, like being just close enough to the gravity well to feel it tugging at his sleeves.

“He told the undercover guy he wishes he could be like him, out in the wilds, fighting for freedom! And he’d been campaigning for criminal justice reform the entire time!”

Iwaizumi texted him a few hours ago. It was short, just “How’d it go?” and Tooru hasn’t replied. His phone is somewhere in the kitchen.

“Oh, I smell a diaper change,” Bokuto says, and Tooru blinks. He hadn’t even noticed the smell beginning to leak from darling Natsumi’s butt.

“Yep, yep, all yours now,” Tooru says when Bokuto reaches for his daughter. He points them towards the bathroom then leans back in his chair, stretching out his good leg to match the bad.

“That healing up alright?” Kuroo asks, gesturing with his beer bottle. He peeled the label off a half hour ago and tried to make a crane with it. The soggy result lies limply by his elbow.

“Yup,” Tooru says. The lie’s starting to dig at him now, between the ribs, though he knows his voice stays steady. “The PT’s a bitch, but everyone warned me about that.”

Kuroo nods, taking another pull of his beer. The muffled, genial noises of father-daughter squabbling filter out of the bathroom, and it’s pleasant and happy but there’s an ache growing behind Tooru’s eyes. He thinks for a second, with real longing, about the gin Iwaizumi stashes behind the cooking oil.

“—was always kinda glad about that,” Kuroo is saying.

“Hm?”

“I was saying I don’t regret getting out of sports before I really got hurt,” Kuroo says again. “Which I absolutely would have, if I’d stayed with it. I was never as good as you two, and look what you’ve done to yourselves. Kotaro’s gonna be lucky to _have_ ankles by the time he retires.”

“Hm,” Tooru says again, starting to wonder how long he can really keep this up. His knee’s throbbing again.

“Not that postdoc work’s bloodless,” Kuroo laughs. He doesn’t seem to notice how much of this conversation he’s carrying. “Almost killed a dude over a lab placement the other day, but, well, that’s academia for you. Everyone’s ready for a fight.”

Another nod. Now Tooru’s working at his own beer label, peeling it to pieces. He doesn’t know where he left his painkillers.

“It’ll be nice when Kotaro retires, I gotta admit. More time with Natsumi, more time with Akaashi, a little extra time for me. I think Fukurodani’s got a coaching position open for him if he ever wants it, though he’s probably got other options.”

He wants Iwaizumi here, suddenly and sickeningly, a need so forceful he rejects it immediately. The nausea remains though, like a reminder, giving strength to the headache and the growing exhaustion and the constant, thrumming hatefulness of his knee.

He wishes he could cut it off. He wishes he could take Kuroo’s, or Bokuto’s, and fit it in place of his own.

“What about you?” Kuroo asks. He’s looking at Tooru. The lights above them are too bright. “You got any plans for retirement?”

“Hey,” says the thing controlling Tooru’s mouth, “I know this is unspeakably rude, but I think I’m about to be sick. Could I ask you guys to leave?”

 

* * *

 

His friends depart without complaint. Only one strange look each.

That night, he dreams of Los Angeles again.

The stadium is dark, the lights dimmed, but the sound is still there. Ceaseless and droning, like cicadas in swarm.

He finds he’s midway through the fall that ruins him. The ball is sailing away from him. He’s looking towards the stands.

Iwaizumi isn’t there, though. Iwaizumi is in front of him.

Tooru tries to protest when Iwaizumi leans in, puts his hand on what will so soon be his bad knee, forces it faster towards the ground. Stop, Tooru tries to say. Don’t.

He can’t speak, though. And Iwaizumi won’t speak.

He just shoves Tooru’s leg down until it straightens, until his foot connects, until his knee collapses.

He keeps his eyes on Tooru as the pain swallows the world.

Tooru wakes up heaving, and doesn’t make it to the bathroom before he vomits.

 

* * *

 

At 9:15 AM, Iwaizumi comes home. Tooru’s on the couch, staring at TV. He’s watching the morning news on mute. He’s been watching it, and the infomercials that came before it, for about seven hours.

“Hey!” Iwaizumi shouts when he opens the door. He sounds a little breathless. “Tooru! You won’t believe who just called me with a job offer! I—”

He cuts off. Tooru is watching the morning anchors gesture. His good knee, that only one that can fucking move, is drawn up to his chest. His hair feels lank around his face, his eyes gritty and dry.

“Hey,” says Iwaizumi again, in a different tone. Tooru knows how he must look. “Babe, are you okay?”

There’s a noise of movement behind him, then a hand, just brushing his shoulder, and then a movement in himself that he recognizes as a flinch. Sudden and violent, away from Iwaizumi’s hand.

The quiet behind him is deep, sudden, and quickly concluded. Iwaizumi comes round the front of the couch and lowers himself to the coffee table between Tooru and the TV.

His face is calm. His keeps his hands spread flat on his thighs.

“What’s wrong,” he says.

For Tooru, it presents itself as a fork in the road.

You could keep doing what you’re doing, says one leg of the split. You could keep lying and trying to do this on your own and pretending everything’s okay and eventually it probably would be. You could make a new life out of this, and never need him again. You’d stand on your own.

The silence drags but Iwaizumi doesn’t press him, though he looks like he hasn’t slept either, up all night saving cats from trees and now forced to sit and wait for his insane boyfriend to figure out how mouths and tongues and sentences work.

Iwaizumi doesn’t seem impatient, though. He’s just looking at Tooru.

You know, says the other leg of the road, in a voice that sounds something like his mother’s and his sister’s and a little bit like Iwaizumi’s. If you keep pushing people away, some day they’re not going to come back.

There’s morning light coming in through the windows, climbing steadily up the folds of Iwaizumi’s coat.

Tooru exhales like it’s being pulled out of him, drawn from his lungs on a line, and presses his face to his bent knee.

“I had a dream that you were the reason I landed badly in Los Angeles,” he says into the darkness of his sweatpants. “That you broke my knee.”

There’s a thin inhalation from the coffee table.

“And do you think that’s true?” Iwaizumi asks.

Tooru realizes, with a sudden guilty jolt, that Iwaizumi would apologize if he said yes. He’d apologize, and agree that it was his fault, and try to make amends to Tooru. He’d do it without hesitation, because he’d think it was important.

“No,” Tooru says, with a force he didn’t know was in him, jerking his head up. “No, god, no. It was a stupid dream, it didn’t mean anything, it’s just yesterday—”

The next words catch in his throat, too wet to go any further, and Tooru realizes he’s about to start crying. Iwaizumi can see it too, and his hands make fists in his uniform pants even as he stays seated.

He has to say it. If not to Iwaizumi, then no one at all, and he can’t do that. He has to tell him.

“I— I need more surgery,” he says, as the news anchors go to silent commercial and the sunlight climbs higher and Iwaizumi waits, just for him. “My knee isn’t healing right. I’m not going to be able to play again.”

The frustration in Iwaizumi’s face, at not knowing, at not being able to fix, falls. He looks for a second as miserable as Tooru, and then more, exponentially more.

“Tooru…” he says, face wretched, voice low. His hands twitch again, wanting to touch, and Tooru lets his good foot drop to the carpet. He holds out a hand.

Iwaizumi is crouching in front of him in an instant, half-kneeling between Tooru’s feet, hugging him tight to his chest. His hands are on Tooru’s back and his neck, fingers threading into his hair, and Tooru presses his face to Iwaizumi’s shoulder. He smells like sweat and disinfectant. Tooru closes his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Iwaizumi says into his ear, rubbing circles over his back. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could fix this for you.”

“Apparently if I played again I’d have arthritis by the time I was forty,” Tooru replies after a long moment of simply tightening his grip, voice muffled by Iwaizumi’s jacket. “You could always just carry me around in your big strong firefighter arms.”

Iwaizumi laughs, a motion Tooru feels with most of his body. “But then you wouldn’t get to hit people in the shins with your sick old man cane.”

God, Tooru wants to spend the rest of his life with him. It’s just embarrassing.

“I’m sorry for ghosting you yesterday,” he says, eyes finally starting to blur. “I didn’t text you back and I kept lying to everyone, and it’s— I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Hey, don’t apologize,” Iwaizumi says, releasing Tooru just long enough to get on the couch next to him and pull him down against his shoulder. “It sounds weird coming from you. Gonna make me think something’s wrong.”

Tooru chuckles wetly, burying his face against Iwaizumi's neck. Iwaizumi lets him, pressing his lips to the part in Tooru's hair and keeping them there. He tightens his grip on Iwaizumi's shirt at one point, where he's slipped his hand in under Iwaizumi jacket, and Iwaizumi wipes at his cheeks with his thumb tells him it'll be alright in his most believable tone. 

The room, at length, gets brighter.

“I just don’t know what to do at all,” Tooru finally says, too tired to not say it and too tired to hate how lost he sounds when he does. “What am I gonna do if I can’t play? It’s all I’ve ever done since we were kids.”

“Actually,” Iwaizumi says, and Tooru lifts his head. Iwaizumi’s smiling a little. “I might have a solution there.”

Tooru's brow wrinkles. “You do?”

“It’s what I was saying when I was coming in. You got a job offer.”

Now Tooru does sit all the way back, one hand on Iwaizumi’s thigh to prop himself up. “Someone called _you_ with a job offer for _me?”_

Iwaizumi shrugs. “Apparently you weren’t picking up your phone.”

Oh. Well, that’s true. Tooru keeps going.

“Well, tell me who it is, then! What do they want!” His cheeks are mostly dry and it’s a little thrill to realize he wants to bother Iwaizumi into exposition, tug on his shirt and piss him off until he tells him what he knows.

“It was Matsukawa, actually,” Iwaizumi says. He’s got this stupid look in his eye, like he knows what Tooru’s thinking and would only beat him up a little bit for it. “He says he’s got a contact at NHK who’s looking for a new guest commentator for their volleyball games. Someone with a pretty face and a fat head, maybe.”

Tooru smacks Iwaizumi’s ear on instinct, but really he’s thinking about _guest commentator._

Guest commentator _on national TV._

Getting paid to dress well and talk about volleyball. An entire hair and makeup team just for him, probably. Maybe even… a trailer?

Iwaizumi is grinning at him, cheeks starting to pink.

Well, probably not a trailer. But…

It could be close. It wouldn’t be the game, but it could be adjacent to it. Something near it.

It’d be close.

“Wait,” Tooru says, suddenly frowning. “Matsukawa called you? Who does _Matsukawa_ know at NHK?”

Iwaizumi rolls his eyes. One of his thumbs is making soft circles over Tooru’s ribs. “You know him and Hanamaki,” he says. “They could probably get us in to see the Prime Minister if we made it worth their time.”

Tooru stares. There’s a muffled clacking outside, the neighborhood crows messing around in their gutters again.

“Hanamaki and Matsukawa write listicles,” Tooru explains, voice careful, extremely unsure of this world Iwaizumi is describing to him. “They work for Buzzfeed. There was one last week about all the worst situations in which to consume weed butter. They wrote that.”

“Yeah, in their spare time,” Iwaizumi says, suddenly looking amused. “Babe, they’re some of the best investigative journalists in the country. Did you not know this?”

“No, they’re fucking not!” Tooru says, or maybe gasps, or maybe shrieks. “Weed butter, Iwa-chan!”

“And weed lube, too, though they didn’t get to publish that one,” Iwaizumi grins. “You know that big scandal about the gunrunning Minister and the Philippine jungle extremists? All them. Hanamaki was undercover with the Tongs for a month.”

Tooru gapes, too drop dead stunned to even care as Iwaizumi laughs at him, face shining with it.

“My whole world is changed,” Tooru says, casting a hand into the uncaring air as Iwaizumi pulls him back against his side and starts flipping through channels. “How dare they be cool. I’m the cool one!”

Iwaizumi, infuriatingly, only kisses his forehead. The TV blinks from news to shopping to weather. “Anyways, you giant child, they definitely know this dude at NHK,” he says. “They could get you an interview.”

He rubs one hand through Tooru’s hair, scratching idly at his scalp like he knows Tooru likes. “You want to set it up?”

Tooru thinks about it. He thinks about being on TV, about smiling for the camera and playing nice with his coworkers and offering his expertise.

He doesn’t mind the thought of that. Having expertise even when his knee is busted and he needs more surgery and he’ll probably still end up needing a sick old man cane by the time he’s forty. If only so he can see how Iwaizumi looks at him when he uses it.

Because Iwaizumi will be there, too. Like he’s always been. Even when Tooru’s fucked up and miserable and lies to him.

“Yeah,” Tooru says as he stretches his legs out under the coffee table, watching a jewel-toned woman talk silently about snowstorms, feeling Iwaizumi rest his head carefully against Tooru’s and settle under his weight. “I could do that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to em and emma for telling me I'm pretty and norway for deciding two months ago that no, I wasn't going to write a porn coda to Thirty Years, I was going to write a sadness sequel instead. Hope it turned out to your tastes, my man.
> 
> Also, had to cut the exchange where this was made explicit, but just so we're all clear here, Bokuto is married to Akaashi and dating Kuroo and if you wanna imagine anyone else being part of that relationship, go for it. I probably agree with you.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[lambergeier.](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com) Talk to me about iwaoi.


End file.
